Her quiet mental state the result of trauma due to a rival mob boss kidnapping and raping her at just age six, as a way to hurt her parents, Guido and Carmilla, the heads of the Bertinelli crime family. No sirree!īorn into one of Gotham’s most powerful mafia families, Helena Bertinelli was an immensely withdrawn girl. Except this wasn’t Helena Wayne, the offspring of Batman and Catwoman. Into this new world, writer Joey Calavieri and long-time character artist Joe Staton would reintroduce Huntress in 1989. And when the dust of Crisis settled, the DC Comics multiverse would be condensed into just a single universe. Thus Helena becomes Huntress, a costumed, crossbow-wielding vigilante who protected the Gotham City of Earth-Two for years… until she didn’t exist anymore.ĭuring the epic Crisis on Infinite Earths crossover of 1985, Helena Wayne would see Earth-Two destroyed before dying herself in an attempt to rescue some innocents from the destruction caused by the Anti-Monitor. When the job the aged Selena Kyle is forced to go on goes south and results in her death, Helena uses her training – and an arsenal of weapons and tools taken from her parents’ stashes – to hunt down her mother’s killer and bring him to justice. When her retired mother was blackmailed into becoming Catwoman once again though, things changed for Helena Wayne.

Trained from young by her parents and mentored by her adoptive older brother Dick Grayson (Nightwing), Helena would become a supreme athlete and master of many martial skills. And in 1957, their union produced a baby girl, Helena Wayne. In this universe, Batman aka Bruce Wayne and Catwoman aka Selena Kyle had openly declared their love for each, got married and settled down. In the Silver Age of DC Comics, the comic publisher’s line saw titles set in many alternate universes (a clever/convenient way to allow different writers/artists to put their own spins on the same characters without clashing continuity), one of which was Earth-Two. But who Huntress is, is actually a pretty complex topic.

With her previous appearance in episodes of Arrow as well as the animated Justice League Unlimited and Batman: The Brave and the Bold, you may think you know Huntress, the crossbow-wielding comic book vigilante that will soon be making her big-screen debut courtesy of Mary Elizabeth Winstead in the upcoming Birds of Prey.

Huntress by Ivory Madison